Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you're generally handling these pretty well, although there are definitely small things to continue working at.

  • I'd be amiss not to mention the fact that the assignment was two pages of contour curves - you did one of contour ellipses, so just be sure to pay more attention to what is specifically assigned in the instructions.

  • To that point, remember that every ellipse drawn in this course freehand needs to be drawn through two full times before lifting your pen - you tend to stop at one to one and a half.

  • It's clear to me that you're paying attention to sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, although the main area you need to pay attention to are the ends. There are a number of places where you're letting them get more stretched out, rather than remaining entirely circular. There are of course a few places where you have ends of different sizes, but these are infrequent so I'm not too worried about that.

  • Remember that in any cylindrical structure, the cross-sectional slices will get wider as we move farther away from the viewer, as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video. In this case, that means as a starting point, your farther contour curves should be getting proportionally wider. This of course is impacted by the sausage itself turning through space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb.

When it comes to the core construction here, you've actually done a pretty great job. For the most part, you've spent your time focusing on every new addition as a 3D structure, and considering the way in which it relates to the existing structure, to respect and reinforce its solidity, generally resulting in a more solid overall result.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

For the most part, you've held quite well to this. You are somewhat prone to extending off some of your forms' silhouettes, and there are a few places where you've cut into some silhouettes, but as a whole the latter is minimal and the former is more prominent when dealing with smaller details. I've marked out some such cases here, in red where you're cutting into silhouettes and in blue where you're extending off them. The little spikes along the legs are also an example of adding elements in 2D space, as they do not provide us with enough information to really understand how they connect to the legs.

All that said, you still are generally holding very well to the premise that everything we're building up is in three dimensions. There are simply ways in which this can be pushed further, or where you didn't quite hold to it as consistently as you did elsewhere.

Instead, what you've generally done to build upon our construction or change something, is to introduce new 3D forms to the structure - forms with their own fully self-enclosed silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. To demonstrate this in isolation so your own understanding of it can be fully solidified (as often we'll do things in our own work that we don't 100% understand or even realize), we can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

Continuing on, I can see that you do appear to be using the sausage method to build up your leg constructions, but there are a few things I noticed:

  • There are a lot of cases where you'll shift more towards using ellipses rather than sausages. Again, this goes towards watching out for the tendency to stretch out the ends, rather than keeping them circular.

  • You do often forget to define the joint between the sausage segments with a contour line, which is an important aspect of the technique.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram.

And that about covers it! Everything I've called out here can continue to be addressed into the next lesson - so be sure to continue refining your application of these points as you move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.